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asdlfahsdljfhaskjfh lksjdhflkashl fkjh slkjfhaslkdfhl askjfhlkasj dfhlkjfkljashlfkhasifuhaipus“You must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything. …Let me be sinful before everyone, but so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise. Am I not in paradise now?”
- Markel, in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Operant conditioning – a cold prase for a concept that might really mean we are sculptors and sculpted, artists and artwork, responsible for the prompts we fashion.”
- Lauren Slater, “Opening Skinner’s Box”
What is corporate sin? Structural evil? A vague concept, useful in its application to the alienating force of capitalism or to an oppressive governing regime, but these are invisible abstractions. In Jacob Aaron Este’s masterful 2005 debut film “Mean Creek,” a movie that my buddy Mike turned me on to last year that has strangely gone unwatched by most folks for three years, offers us a very concrete depiction of what it looks like to be both sinner and sinned against, the willing participant in a force of evil that we did not will into being. The story pivots on one character, George, an overweight class bully with a learning disability. The development of his character is a thrilling convergence of virtuostic debuts – Estes’ screenwriting and directing, and Josh Peck’s acting are both phenomenal. George elicits a terrible range of emotions as the other five characters (and the audience through them) come to regard him at various points with hatred, pity, compassion, and ultimately, hopefully, love. He is a mystery, a secret, and this story painfully articulates the danger of reductionism, of presuming to know the enigma of another’s existence well enough to judge it.
In the first scene, George pummels Sam, whose depiction by Rory Culkin is easily the best performance in family history, for touching his camcorder. Rocky, Sam’s older
asdlfahsdljfhaskjfh lksjdhflkashl fkjh slkjfhaslkdfhl askjfhlkasj dfhlkjfkljashlfkhasifuhaipus“You must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything. …Let me be sinful before everyone, but so that everyone will forgive me, and that is paradise. Am I not in paradise now?”
- Markel, in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Operant conditioning – a cold prase for a concept that might really mean we are sculptors and sculpted, artists and artwork, responsible for the prompts we fashion.”
- Lauren Slater, “Opening Skinner’s Box”
What is corporate sin? Structural evil? A vague concept, useful in its application to the alienating force of capitalism or to an oppressive governing regime, but these are invisible abstractions. In Jacob Aaron Este’s masterful 2005 debut film “Mean Creek,” a movie that my buddy Mike turned me on to last year that has strangely gone unwatched by most folks for three years, offers us a very concrete depiction of what it looks like to be both sinner and sinned against, the willing participant in a force of evil that we did not will into being. The story pivots on one character, George, an overweight class bully with a learning disability. The development of his character is a thrilling convergence of virtuostic debuts – Estes’ screenwriting and directing, and Josh Peck’s acting are both phenomenal. George elicits a terrible range of emotions as the other five characters (and the audience through them) come to regard him at various points with hatred, pity, compassion, and ultimately, hopefully, love. He is a mystery, a secret, and this story painfully articulates the danger of reductionism, of presuming to know the enigma of another’s existence well enough to judge it.
In the first scene, George pummels Sam, whose depiction by Rory Culkin is easily the best performance in family history, for touching his camcorder. Rocky, Sam’s older